Hacker News Reader

Comment by bognition | Hacker News Reader

Group chat has always been the killer social app. 6 years ago I convinced my browser friends group to adopt Telegram and since then we’ve all abandoned FB, Instagram, etc… We have a ton of different threads all with different topics: kids, food, gardening, exercise, pets, memes, and a bunch of serious topic threads as well.

It’s been incredibly effective at keeping us connected and engaged as we’ve all moved across the country and grow in an apart physically.

The take away is; what people want from social media is to be connected with their real friends. However that isn’t as engaging as a random feed, so the companies push people away from that.

View on HN

I guess group chat would be fine if all your friends are friends of each other. High School and college ages maybe, but as an older adult, I have so many different groups of people that I interact with that it would be obnoxious to deal with. I also find that there are certain people in group chats who are lonely and spam crap.

You can have many group chats though?

I do that in Signal, I have group chats with different circles of friends ,and we also regularly create short-lived purpose-built chats for events or other things...

It's a bit more friction perhaps but in the end it works well and we've been doing it for years.

I'm in a similar group but using Discord. It seems that lack of advertising or any kind of algo feed is the common feature. Who runs your Telegram server?

Do you mean 'run' as in run the community in some sort of administration sense? Telegram cannot be self-hosted (unless I am misinformed..).

Neither can Discord; its usage of "server" in particular is a weaponized misappropriation.

I mean, their internal terminology is still guild. I’m not sure they intended to call it server until their userbase did?

Muddling the meaning of the term "server" either way.

>Who runs your Telegram server?

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Federal_Security_Service

I hate group chats (hate). It's a cliquey childish high-school cafeteria mode of communicating (thus why highschoolers use group chats). It's a clear step backwards and is representative of the covid-era stazi-like mentality people developed where they felt it was unsanity to share their views or life with the world at large (and maybe, given what we've learned about social media and nation-states, that's not without merit -- i.e the UK). Perfect world social media is a means of forming connections and expanding your little room(s).

Is it - hear me out - possible that you are overthinking this? People tend to use group chats for coordination and quick banter with people they already know. Not as an alternative to the phpBB boards of old.

Eh, I think the parent has a point. You underline it yourself when you say “people they already know”.

The internet didn’t always involve a choice between “talk to people I know” vs “bravely/foolishly taking on the vitriol of a wild horde of angry delusional maniacs”, but now we’ve lost almost all of the space in between those extremes. People like hacker news exactly because it’s the rare place that’s still in the middle *(sometimes, on some topics, for now)

There’s a lot of people on hackernews with whom I cannot agree on a great many important things. Happily, none of them appear to be technical, so it works out fine.

>It's a clear step backwards and is representative of the covid-era stazi-like mentality people developed where they felt it was unsanity to share their views or life with the world at large...

... what? I'm in my late 30's and group chats have been a part of life for myself, my friends and my family since the late 90's. I've never wanted to share my views with "the world at large" online, but I have no problem being myself and sharing my views in meatspace, where being open and honest about who I am is far more impactful to those I interact with and the world around me than it ever has been on social media.

Within the world of the pop-web, even on this website to a point, the ability to have a truly nuanced discussion has essentially been eliminated. People would rather throw out hot takes based on disingenuous interpretations of someone's comment/statement rather than try and have an impactful, open conversation.

Sounds like you’d have appreciated 90s era irc, which was good for nuanced and sincere discussion, but also did not require talking to people that you already knew.

There’s a sweet spot between open/closed and known/unknown and somewhat focused but not too niche where it kind of works. Theres a certain size that works too, ideally Lots of users and yet occasionally you recognize someone. But I don’t think that’s what people mean at all by group chat today, which regardless of venue tends to be rather more insular and thus echo’y.

In IRC, and as many do here, you used an alias to have the confidence to speak freely. Products like WhatsApp where people reveal their real identities don't lend themselves to that frankness when membership is open.

I very much appreciated 90s era IRC back in the day. I find community comparable to what you described in still-existing phpBB and phpBB-esque hobby-focused forums that I use regularly.

There's far too much downside to sharing your genuine thoughts, especially on politics, or things you find funny, etc. with the entire Internet because regular people and nation-state level actors will vilify you and nowadays even have you deported for things you say publicly.

That's why we all use group chats and messaging. There's no safe alternative

There is nothing preventing you from expanding your group chat roster. It is just that random strangers can't drop in; you have to add them.

You would have to sacrifice the privacy of your group if you wanted to support serendipitous membership growth. Do you want to be constantly reviewing membership requests? That's what Facebook groups look like. And you have little information to judge the requests by, since the profiles can be fake, especially today. And when complete strangers can join the group, the dynamics change.

"Perfect world social media is a means of forming connections"

What stops people from being part of X group chats? All a connection on their own?

Reply on news.ycombinator.com